Actually about two years ago I did buy an ACR video on this site but was very disappointed. I felt I was just watching two guys congratulating all the software guys on what a good job they'd done. I don't think I even bothered to watch it all.

"The basic philosophy is to let Camera Raw perform those operations that are best done on the raw image. If you just use Camera Raw at default settings to open images in Photoshop, then make all your adjustments there, you’re making extra work for yourself, and almost certainly not getting the best possible results. The fundamental difference between editing in Camera Raw and editing in Photoshop is that in the former, you’re editing the conversion from the raw to a rendered image, while in the latter you’re simply moving levels around in an already-rendered image."

Regarding spotting, the level of control and the variety of tools is greater in PS. The spotting tool in ACR is good for spotting flaws that reside in areas of little or no texture.

You can switch to "Clone" for doing pattern work. Healing works well on random skin texture patterns.

I do most of all my edits in ACR. I use Photoshop's Warp tool for fixing wide angle lens distortion and Selection and Crop tool for filling in empty patches along the periphery of the image the Warp tool creates.

Thanks to all. I printed out the Understanding ACR 3 pdf and will read that. I do have the 7 hour video back on my computer at home and must watch it even if I am put off a bit by the big guys Hawaii shirt.

Basically, the difference is that doing edits in ACR(or Light Room) on RAW FILES, is that you are doing non destructive editing on metadata. Once the file has been rendered into PS you are working on pixels and data is lost once you close the file. If you edit RAW in ACR, you can always go back to make further edits because until you open the file up in PS, you are not doing pixel damage, only edits to a set of instructions. If you are shooting jpegs,(both ACR & LR can work on jpegs) then you image has already been rendered and any edits you make will be just as if ther were in PS.

Just one quick thought. I read Understanding ACR 3, realized it was of course out of date but my main query is sort of answered in that pdf. It suggests you need to decide where to save your edits with two choices:

# The Camera Raw database# Sidecar xmp files

Can an xmp file save the workflow edits, can I for instance go back through the workflow and correct for a part of the work. Say perhaps you produced an image then a week later decided you had made too big a crop could you go back.

And Sniper you think I should be using Lightroom. Personally I think I should be using a box brownie.

As far as the preview is concerned it's the same Raw file only now the pixels you're working on will change differently by appearance compared to working in ACR due to the tools in Photoshop are now working on gamma encoded pixels.

In ACR the tools behave as seen through the preview in a linear gamma space as close as possible to the original sensor data after demosaicing except the edits are written as instructions where as Photoshop edits are acting directly on the pixel preview data that finally gets written to tiff or jpeg format after saving to the hard drive.

You can see the tonal edit behavior applying Exposure, Contrast and Brightness edits in ACR which is much more smoother allowing more refined tweaks than applying similar edits using Levels and other Photoshop slider based tools which tend to create jumpy responses in previews by comparison (note Hue/Sat tools). This is one of the main reasons I try to do all edits in ACR.

For me applying edits in ACR is similar to tweaking a multi-band EQ on expensive audio equipment where Photoshop acts more like tweaking EQ in iTunes.

You need to work with ACR for a while to get a sense of what I'm talking about.

No -- as-long-as you don't overwrite the original RAW file, you can go-back and open-as RAW with the ACR processing-instructions previously saved in the XMP file, and then you can change those ACR processing-instructions, and then open in Photoshop again.

Please can you give me a quick step by step route through that process because I just need to see how to access that history. I really like the potential to learn ACR but what scares me is that I might spend an hour processing an image in ACR then work on it in Photoshop only to realize I missed some part of the earlier ACR processing.

If you can just guide me through a simple process say for arguments sake:

Open in ACR>WB adjust>exposure adjust>open in Photoshop>crop>work in Layers > save as??? and from there the way in which I would reopen the image and re-adjust the WB.